IF Comp 2013 roundup
The comp is over, and the results are in. (If you're reading via Planet-IF and missed my reviews, they're all here.) Highlights:
If you want a strongly-written, ambitious story: play Solarium.
If you want something brutal, introspective and poetic: play Their angelical understanding.
If you want to play something where interaction is crucial to the narrative: Play Coloratura. Or play Ollie Ollie Oxen Free in a few months, if it's been properly fixed by then.
If you want a game to play with your kids: play Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House. (But wait until it's done first.)
If you want something straightforwardly fun: play Final Girl if you have a lot of time, or Captain Verdeterre's Plunder if you don't.
If you want to play a Game For Change: Play Impostor Syndrome or Autumn's Daughter.
If you want a shameless puzzlebox and don't give a tinker's toss for the fiction part: play Threediopolis.
For me, things sorted into tiers pretty straightforwardly: there's a very clear top three in Coloratura, Solarium and Their angelical understanding (all, I note, by returning authors whose previous comp entries narrowly missed the top 10). Any of these would have been deserving winners, and the fact that they don't form the top three reminded me that I am very much not the median comp voter, because it felt to me as though there was a pretty substantial quality gap between them and the rest of the field.
Below that tier, there were a raft of games that are, in very different ways, quite modest in their goals. Final Girl and Captain Verdeterre are fun, but aren't interested in being anything more than neat distractions; Bell Park is a bunch of snark cobbled together into a not-very-interactive short story; Mrs. Wobbles doesn't get far beyond introductions; Further is safely orthodox and minimalist. Impostor Syndrome successfully tackles a difficult issue, but its narrative and interaction goals are quite narrow. Threediopolis, by contrast, is a decent puzzlebox, but takes a pass on everything else. Robin & Orchid also fell into this tier for me; though I think others got a lot more out of it, I encountered it as a mostly setting-oriented piece which was disappointingly muted in terms of character and story. It's at the top of my post-comp replay list, though.
The odd one out of that tier is Ollie Ollie Oxen Free, which is ambitious and deals with compelling themes, but has severe problems with its execution. I bumped its score up a little mainly because it's the only game in that pack that's dealing with meaty topics and grappling with player involvement at the heart of the story. I really want more people to be taking on that kind of difficult material; so I was inclined to reward even mixed success.
So, hmm, results analysis. As I said, I usually feel out-of-sync with the comp results, and this was a particularly big year for that. I'm used, by now, to the average Comp voter being much more of a Tex Bonaventure guy than I am, but dang. In general, that's okay; Comp rankings aren't the only form of recognition that the community gives games.
I think that an anti-CYOA skew may be part of the story here - I had 6 CYOAs in my top 10, versus 4 in the actual voting. But I also think that this isn't an inherent anti-CYOA bias, and that Deirdra Kiai - who remains the author of the highest-placed CYOA in the Comp to date - is basically right about this part:
I have a hypothesis as to why this is the case. People in the IF community like games where the player has a lot of agency and a lot of interesting things to do. “The Play” had this in spades. “Impostor Syndrome” gives you neither. There’s a lot to explore, but very little to affect.
We talk about Rameses as though it's an uncontroversial classic these days, but bear in mind that it placed 13th, four places behind Yet Another Game With A Dragon! So, y'know, this is not something new about the comp. I think that a bunch of people are fundamentally unconvinced by the idea that IF can be sustained on choice that's reflective rather than active, which would go a long way towards explaining the relatively poor showing of Solarium and Their angelical understanding.
But what I noticed more was that some CYOA games did relatively well - Bell Park, Machine of Death, even Trapped in Time, which was published as a freakin' PDF, so you'd expect that if any game suffered as CYOA, it'd be that. So it's not just linearity, low agency or anti-CYOA sentiment that's at work here. Those are fairly different games, structurally speaking, but they're all relatively light content-wise; they're not political, poetic, dark or artsy. I think that the comp tends to skew somewhat - not massively, but somewhat - against games that deal with painful or overtly political content, and I wouldn't be surprised if that skew was stronger this year because there were a lot of them. Comp fatigue is a thing not to be underestimated. My random draw put the two best of the Oppression Issues games right at the end, and by that point it was definitely work to play through and fairly assess them. I felt that this was work worth doing, but if your goal in the Comp is to play some fun games, you probably wouldn't agree. (Remember, to do well in the comp it's not enough to be widely-liked: it is equally important to avoid dislike. Being inoffensive is exactly as important as being awesome.)
There's one game not accounted for by this. I had expected that Final Girl would score substantially higher than I had rated it - slasher horror and mystery are things that the Average IF Audience likes a fair bit more than I do, and I expected that its high replay value and fun, genre-heavy style would endear it to a good number of people. As it turns out, I rated it slightly higher than its mean score. I suspect that a lot of people bounced off StoryNexus as a platform rather than the game per se, and another bunch got killed without getting to the core identity-revelation mechanic and didn't pursue it further (which is also a StoryNexus problem, to some extent - no save or undo).
Here's Jason MacIntosh, via Twitter:
IFComp’s main role: annual heartbeat, birthing many new text games. Rankings just a catalyst. XYZZYs offer truer, hindsight-enabled judging.
Obviously as a XYZZY organiser I'm not entirely sure about the second part. But I think the general point holds: a lot of the problem is that we have overly high expectations of the Comp because it's such a dominant event. I'd like to see more IF events, with different rules and standards, reflecting different expectations and values. I'd like to see panel-judged events, events where there are more structured [ETA: more structured standards for voting]. I'd like to see another Indigo New Language event. I'd like to see a comp for first-time authors that's explicitly about feedback rather than ratings. I'd like to see curated, showcase events. I think we could also do a better job of letting authors know what they were letting themselves in for by entering the Comp. I'm a lot more sceptical about the feasibility of overhauling the basic way in which the Comp works.
If you want a strongly-written, ambitious story: play Solarium.
If you want something brutal, introspective and poetic: play Their angelical understanding.
If you want to play something where interaction is crucial to the narrative: Play Coloratura. Or play Ollie Ollie Oxen Free in a few months, if it's been properly fixed by then.
If you want a game to play with your kids: play Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House. (But wait until it's done first.)
If you want something straightforwardly fun: play Final Girl if you have a lot of time, or Captain Verdeterre's Plunder if you don't.
If you want to play a Game For Change: Play Impostor Syndrome or Autumn's Daughter.
If you want a shameless puzzlebox and don't give a tinker's toss for the fiction part: play Threediopolis.
For me, things sorted into tiers pretty straightforwardly: there's a very clear top three in Coloratura, Solarium and Their angelical understanding (all, I note, by returning authors whose previous comp entries narrowly missed the top 10). Any of these would have been deserving winners, and the fact that they don't form the top three reminded me that I am very much not the median comp voter, because it felt to me as though there was a pretty substantial quality gap between them and the rest of the field.
Below that tier, there were a raft of games that are, in very different ways, quite modest in their goals. Final Girl and Captain Verdeterre are fun, but aren't interested in being anything more than neat distractions; Bell Park is a bunch of snark cobbled together into a not-very-interactive short story; Mrs. Wobbles doesn't get far beyond introductions; Further is safely orthodox and minimalist. Impostor Syndrome successfully tackles a difficult issue, but its narrative and interaction goals are quite narrow. Threediopolis, by contrast, is a decent puzzlebox, but takes a pass on everything else. Robin & Orchid also fell into this tier for me; though I think others got a lot more out of it, I encountered it as a mostly setting-oriented piece which was disappointingly muted in terms of character and story. It's at the top of my post-comp replay list, though.
The odd one out of that tier is Ollie Ollie Oxen Free, which is ambitious and deals with compelling themes, but has severe problems with its execution. I bumped its score up a little mainly because it's the only game in that pack that's dealing with meaty topics and grappling with player involvement at the heart of the story. I really want more people to be taking on that kind of difficult material; so I was inclined to reward even mixed success.
So, hmm, results analysis. As I said, I usually feel out-of-sync with the comp results, and this was a particularly big year for that. I'm used, by now, to the average Comp voter being much more of a Tex Bonaventure guy than I am, but dang. In general, that's okay; Comp rankings aren't the only form of recognition that the community gives games.
I think that an anti-CYOA skew may be part of the story here - I had 6 CYOAs in my top 10, versus 4 in the actual voting. But I also think that this isn't an inherent anti-CYOA bias, and that Deirdra Kiai - who remains the author of the highest-placed CYOA in the Comp to date - is basically right about this part:
I have a hypothesis as to why this is the case. People in the IF community like games where the player has a lot of agency and a lot of interesting things to do. “The Play” had this in spades. “Impostor Syndrome” gives you neither. There’s a lot to explore, but very little to affect.
We talk about Rameses as though it's an uncontroversial classic these days, but bear in mind that it placed 13th, four places behind Yet Another Game With A Dragon! So, y'know, this is not something new about the comp. I think that a bunch of people are fundamentally unconvinced by the idea that IF can be sustained on choice that's reflective rather than active, which would go a long way towards explaining the relatively poor showing of Solarium and Their angelical understanding.
But what I noticed more was that some CYOA games did relatively well - Bell Park, Machine of Death, even Trapped in Time, which was published as a freakin' PDF, so you'd expect that if any game suffered as CYOA, it'd be that. So it's not just linearity, low agency or anti-CYOA sentiment that's at work here. Those are fairly different games, structurally speaking, but they're all relatively light content-wise; they're not political, poetic, dark or artsy. I think that the comp tends to skew somewhat - not massively, but somewhat - against games that deal with painful or overtly political content, and I wouldn't be surprised if that skew was stronger this year because there were a lot of them. Comp fatigue is a thing not to be underestimated. My random draw put the two best of the Oppression Issues games right at the end, and by that point it was definitely work to play through and fairly assess them. I felt that this was work worth doing, but if your goal in the Comp is to play some fun games, you probably wouldn't agree. (Remember, to do well in the comp it's not enough to be widely-liked: it is equally important to avoid dislike. Being inoffensive is exactly as important as being awesome.)
There's one game not accounted for by this. I had expected that Final Girl would score substantially higher than I had rated it - slasher horror and mystery are things that the Average IF Audience likes a fair bit more than I do, and I expected that its high replay value and fun, genre-heavy style would endear it to a good number of people. As it turns out, I rated it slightly higher than its mean score. I suspect that a lot of people bounced off StoryNexus as a platform rather than the game per se, and another bunch got killed without getting to the core identity-revelation mechanic and didn't pursue it further (which is also a StoryNexus problem, to some extent - no save or undo).
Here's Jason MacIntosh, via Twitter:
IFComp’s main role: annual heartbeat, birthing many new text games. Rankings just a catalyst. XYZZYs offer truer, hindsight-enabled judging.
Obviously as a XYZZY organiser I'm not entirely sure about the second part. But I think the general point holds: a lot of the problem is that we have overly high expectations of the Comp because it's such a dominant event. I'd like to see more IF events, with different rules and standards, reflecting different expectations and values. I'd like to see panel-judged events, events where there are more structured [ETA: more structured standards for voting]. I'd like to see another Indigo New Language event. I'd like to see a comp for first-time authors that's explicitly about feedback rather than ratings. I'd like to see curated, showcase events. I think we could also do a better job of letting authors know what they were letting themselves in for by entering the Comp. I'm a lot more sceptical about the feasibility of overhauling the basic way in which the Comp works.